Songs and sound. Guitars and stuff.

Twelve-string guitars, part three

This is a nice tuning for the keys of C, a minor and F, and not too adaptable beyond that, but what’s nice about it is the range it spans: two octaves plus a major third, which is just about as much as practical without having bass strings that are too floppy and treble strings that are too tight and liable to break.

Those of you who’ve studied alternate tunings might know this one as a favourite of Nick Drake’s – it’s the tuning behind Pink Moon, Which Will, Parasite, the two Hazey Jane songs and the Introduction instrumental. But the tuning works equally well on a twelve string, where the added octave strings make the range of the tuning even wider (two octaves plus a fifth).

The approach that Drake took on Pink Moon (and Place to Be, which uses a similar tuning with the B string tuned down to G rather than up to C) is to fret the lowest three strings and play the top three strings open: 222000, 555000 and so on. Those two shapes will give you a d minor and F respectively.

D minor you say? But it’s got a G in it! And a C and an E! Bu that’s really the point of alternate tunings. You can create these wide, harmonically open chords that would be impossible to play in standard. In the context of Pink Moon (and Place to Be), the ear hears that as a minor chord built on the second degree of the scale. Which is to say, it hears d minor. The beautiful ambiguity of this kind of chord is what made Drake’s guitar playing so expressive and what attracts so many of us to alternate tunings in the first place.

If you play these kind of shapes on a twelve-string it won’t sound earthy and intimate, as on Pink Moon. ‘Earthy’ isn’t what twelve-strings do. Instead it will sound bright, airy, ethereal. But that’s good, too.